Mass. General Museum

So, let's see. Mass General is the key member of Partners Health Care, which the Globe and Martha Coakley have shown receives an enormous premium relative to the quality of care it provides. It is able to extract much more from insurers for providing the same (or inferior) care as other hospitals, because patients insist that their plans include MGH, and insurers are willing to pay almost any price to avoid leaving it out and watching their customers switch to another plan. And why? Because of its sterling reputation.

So let's be clear. This is not a beneficent gesture - it's a calculated reinvestment of profits. MGH makes a great deal of money off of its reputation. Taking some of those earnings, and plowing them back into a large display aimed at demonstrating the general superiority of MGH, is just smart business. The more that potential patients hear about MGH's history of cutting-edge care and innovations, the more likely they are to insist upon its inclusion in their coverage. And that's how MGH extracts a premium for its care from our local insurers.

I don't think that hospitals ought to be allowed to advertise for patients - every dollar they spend on their ads comes from our insurance premiums, and makes the care they deliver that much more expensive. And this museum is just a larger, inordinately expensive advertisement. It serves no higher purpose. MGH is a non-profit institution. It's supposed to plow these funds back into improving the quality of its care, and to reducing its costs. But, perversely, care at the non-profit MGH costs much more than care at most for-profit competitors. Let MGH donate its archives and artifacts to Harvard Medical School, if it's interested in preserving and disseminating the knowledge embedded within them. But build a separate, stand-alone museum? This is exactly why our premiums rise each year.

For many years MGH has had exhibits about the use of ether in surgery (first hospital to use it - but it turns out a doctor in Georgia was a couple of years ahead of them) and other random bits of medical ephemera strewn around the libraries and lobbies and basement hallway showcases. When I worked there, I used to wander around at break time with a cup of coffee and find random bits of medical history and artifacts here and there on the campus.

I don't know who was tasked with keeping an eye on all these things, some of which are probably quite valuable, but it is probably worth paying somebody to keep track of them at the very least. Ditto for the archives, which were probably not very well curated for a long time - more or less in dead storage in the library. I think an important and cost-saving addition is the function space, which is sorely lacking and often has to be rented off-site at relatively high cost. If they can hold seminars and events in house with their own catering resources, they save money and can even bring in outside money for spill-over functions from the hotel that was built next door.